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MaxRideWizardLord

Is there any small mod to bring back the cutscenes from the PS1 version of the game to PC?

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As some of you may know, the PS1 version of the game had cutscenes in the HeXen, and it's trully awesome looking. Unfortunately, PC did not had any cutscenes. But perhaps is there a small mod that adds these cutscenes + makes them work in proper times, or work around to get these cutscenes work for PC version of the game? Would be such a lovely experience to play HeXen on DOSBox with these cutscenes installed.

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Theoretically, old versions of ZDoom could play movie files in AVI format. However, this was removed in later versions due to not really functioning anymore, and it only ever worked on Windows anyway.

 

So AFAIK there's no source port that includes movie playback, and so the end result is "No, unless someone adds movie support to the codebase."

 

And you'd need a sourceport anyway as a result, so no DOSBox for you. It's simply impossible to do under the original PC engine, unless you modified that version and that version alone, and at that point you're running into some other serious issues.

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On 9/4/2019 at 11:59 PM, Dark Pulse said:

Theoretically, old versions of ZDoom could play movie files in AVI format. However, this was removed in later versions due to not really functioning anymore, and it only ever worked on Windows anyway.

 

So AFAIK there's no source port that includes movie playback, and so the end result is "No, unless someone adds movie support to the codebase."

 

And you'd need a sourceport anyway as a result, so no DOSBox for you. It's simply impossible to do under the original PC engine, unless you modified that version and that version alone, and at that point you're running into some other serious issues.

 

That's quite sad... I wouldn't really mind a tiny adjustment to the original .exe which doesn't change anything other than make the .exe play the cutscenes at the right time. None of that was ever done? Is it even possible?

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38 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

That's quite sad... I wouldn't really mind a tiny adjustment to the original .exe which doesn't change anything other than make the .exe play the cutscenes at the right time. None of that was ever done? Is it even possible?

Got to remember the sorts of systems Hexen was designed to run on. There simply wouldn't have been the horsepower to handle that sort of video, at that sort of resolution, with that sort of framerate.

 

Quake II was the first id game to include in-game cinematics like that, and for the record, those were rendered at 320x240, 22 or 11 kHz audio (11 if mono, 22 if stereo), 8-bit palettized color, at about 10-15 FPS. In short, heavily, HEAVILY optimized and compressed to sacrifice a certain degree of quality in the name of being able to run solely off the CPU.

 

That's still nowhere near what the PSX could do, and it's well beyond what DOS was expected to do - as well as what CPUs were capable of. In those days, CPUs were so slow that movie playback needed additional, discrete hardware cards to approach anything similar, and the ability to render it effectively in software on the CPU didn't come out until the Pentium MMX - nearly a full year after Hexen was released. Even then it took until the Pentium II for it to really be "acceptable" quality at the time roughly on par with the stuff you'd find on the PS1.

 

So in short, it's not really possible for the original EXE - not without some extensive hacking of the engine (this isn't a "tiny adjustment" to the original EXE by any stretch of the imagination), and basically abuse of the OS since you'd have to definitely do some video mode magic in order to try to get a respectable framerate. DOS simply wasn't up to playing video like that, and even if you got it to go, you'd have to reduce the bandwidth so heavily that at best the end result would likely be pretty unsatisfying.

 

A source port, of course, could make this happen with relative ease, but it's a whole heck of a lot of work just for one little addition that will get sparing use.

Edited by Dark Pulse

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20 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Got to remember the sorts of systems Hexen was designed to run on. There simply wouldn't have been the horsepower to handle that sort of video, at that sort of resolution, with that sort of framerate.

 

Quake II was the first id game to include in-game cinematics like that, and for the record, those were rendered at 320x240, 22 or 11 kHz audio (11 if mono, 22 if stereo), 8-bit palettized color, at about 10-15 FPS. In short, heavily, HEAVILY optimized and compressed to sacrifice a certain degree of quality in the name of being able to run solely off the CPU.

 

That's still nowhere near what the PSX could do, and it's well beyond what DOS was expected to do - as well as what CPUs were capable of. In those days, CPUs were so slow that movie playback needed additional, discrete hardware cards to approach anything similar, and the ability to render it effectively in software on the CPU didn't come out until the Pentium MMX - nearly a full year after Hexen was released. Even then it took until the Pentium II for it to really be "acceptable" quality at the time roughly on par with the stuff you'd find on the PS1.

 

So in short, it's not really possible for the original EXE - not without some extensive hacking of the engine (this isn't a "tiny adjustment" to the original EXE by any stretch of the imagination), and basically abuse of the OS since you'd have to definitely do some video mode magic in order to try to get a respectable framerate. DOS simply wasn't up to playing video like that, and even if you got it to go, you'd have to reduce the bandwidth so heavily that at best the end result would likely be pretty unsatisfying.

 

A source port, of course, could make this happen with relative ease, but it's a whole heck of a lot of work just for one little addition that will get sparing use.

 

I doubt that Hexen cutscenes are anywhere better resolution than the one you're describing. Seems like perfect fitting for DOSbox, and fit in to it's framerate as well. 320x240 is absolutely my sort of thing. I'm not sure about the PS1 port, but the HeXen is at least 2 years earlier than Quake 2.

 

Wish there was port that would at least get as close as DOSbox at least. I don't know about "sparing" use, but the cutscene for HeXen is pretty decent and fun.

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Eh? There were plenty of games for dos that had fmvs before Q2.

Edited by kristus

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descent 2, released 1996, can play back 640x480 fmvs at 24 fps, so uh... (okay they're not quite 640x480 since they're letterboxed, but they're still fairly high resolution). Also, both Strife and Chex Quest had videos that played before the game started...

 

I guess potentially the relatively low quality of Quake 2's FMVs was due to slowness when uploading frames as textures to OpenGL? I dunno I'm grasping for straws here... It feels like other games at the time were able to do much better. I can't get a good feel for what their resolutions are, but the original Starcraft FMVs run at a higher framerate.

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5 hours ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

I wish there was port that would at least get as close as DOSbox at least.

Chocolate Hexen?

 

Trying to edit the Hexen EXE so that it recognizes the PS1 Hexen's cutscenes and plays them at the correct points sounds near impossible.  Looking on the Hexen PS1 CD, I see the cutscene files are in STR format.  I found an STR document online written by Michael Sabin that says "the decoding process is long, and rather complicated."  In other words, the cutscenes are in some convoluted format that was written specifically for the PS1 console--not DOS PCs.

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I remember seeing a mod where someone put an entire episode of Simpsons (or part of it, I don't remember) using just an animated texture. No ANIMDEFS, ANIMATED, nothing - that should work on DOSBox. I don't know how he made them go faster, but as it seems, you can add an infinite number of frames to animated textures and it will not crash.

 

Unfortunately I can't find the link anymore.

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14 minutes ago, Noiser said:

I remember seeing a mod where someone put an entire episode of Simpsons (or part of it, I don't remember) using just an animated texture. No ANIMDEFS, ANIMATED, nothing - that should work on DOSBox. I don't know how he made them go faster, but as it seems, you can add an infinite number of frames to animated textures and it will not crash.

 

Unfortunately I can't find the link anymore.

 

This one?

 

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12 hours ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

I doubt that Hexen cutscenes are anywhere better resolution than the one you're describing. Seems like perfect fitting for DOSbox, and fit in to it's framerate as well. 320x240 is absolutely my sort of thing. I'm not sure about the PS1 port, but the HeXen is at least 2 years earlier than Quake 2.

 

Wish there was port that would at least get as close as DOSbox at least. I don't know about "sparing" use, but the cutscene for HeXen is pretty decent and fun.

Hexen came out October 30, 1995; Quake II came out December 9, 1997, so you are correct in that it's two years older. The PlayStation version of Hexen, however, didn't come out until June 30, 1997. (If you lived in the EU, you got it in March.)

 

I took a look at the video files on disc. Hexen's FMVs are 320x200 (really 320x208 but the bottom 8px will get cropped), ~20 FPS (19.979 to be precise), 37.8 kHz (standard for PSX XA audio). 

 

Here's the thing. At a bare minimum, you would need to do the following:

  1. Either convert the movie from the PlayStation's native STR format, or write a compatible implementation with that format (which would only work for that format - thus, useless for general use). It's been quite thoroughly reverse-engineered, so it shouldn't be too hard if someone cares enough.
  2. Take the DOS source code for Hexen and tell it that there's now movies to play.
  3. Deal with VGA video mode fuckery. Again, it's not like modern systems where you just tell it "I'm this resolution." No, VGA has a list of supported video modes. You either use one of those, or you get no video - unless you don't mind tying your port to only ever run on a certain manufacturer's self-defined video mode.
    • Considering the video's requirements, you effectively have only one solution: Mode 13h, the same mode Doom uses. However, this is limited to 256 colors. Do you want a 16/24-bit color space? Sorry, you're not using VGA then (the video chips don't have enough memory for those), which kills your attempt. Technically you could use a manufacturer-specific card that would support it, but you'd literally be switching video modes just to play the video without color loss, and then switching back for gameplay - but it'd only work on that card. If, on the other hand, you don't mind reducing it to 256 colors, you can still use VGA for this. (Note, there is an XGA standard, but that was little-used. It would, however, work - but you'd need to upsample the video resolution, because simply put there is no 320x200, 16-bit color mode.)
  4. Sound is at a non-standard frequency for PCs. Most sound chips of the day supported 11, 22, and 44.1 kHz. You would either need to up-convert it (taking more space), or down-convert it (quality loss, but also almost halving the size of the audio track).
  5. Lastly, and most importantly, compress the video down so it uses as little bandwidth as possible, while still having acceptable playback quality. The more rich that quality is, of course, the more bandwidth that requires. This is DOS, so this is 100% dependent on the CPU - graphics cards had little to no video acceleration at the time (stuff like the 3DFX Voodoo weren't around until late 1996), so you either would require some sort of hardware-accelerated video playback card, or depend 100% on the CPU. Intel's contemporary Indeo video format, for example, was designed to run on real-time on 386/486 CPUs, but only in - you guessed it - Windows.
    • The PSX didn't have to worry about this, it had a hardware MDEC within its CPU.
9 hours ago, kristus said:

Eh? There were plenty of games for dos that had fmvs before Q2.

Not at the quality he seeks. 320x200, ~20 FPS, 37.8 kHz audio, and at least 16-bit color. VGA never had a 320x200@16bpp mode; most sound chips won't support 37.8 kHz audio, either. He'd need both of those to not have to convert it.

 

Also, I said Q2 was id's first game with FMVs (AFAIK). I know there was others before this.

 

8 hours ago, SaladBadger said:

descent 2, released 1996, can play back 640x480 fmvs at 24 fps, so uh... (okay they're not quite 640x480 since they're letterboxed, but they're still fairly high resolution). Also, both Strife and Chex Quest had videos that played before the game started...

Those must've got played in some other way then. Videos of Chex Quest running in DOSBox don't show any videos playing (at least, ones I've seen). I did see a video for Strife but I don't know if that's running in the EXE or something else entirely - another video I saw skipped right to the "loading" screen. Descent 2 does show them playing within DOS, but that definitely doesn't look like 640x480 to me. If it is, I'd really love to know how, since again, they'd be busting VGA mode if they did anything higher than 320x200, or anything higher than 256 colors.

 

8 hours ago, SaladBadger said:

I guess potentially the relatively low quality of Quake 2's FMVs was due to slowness when uploading frames as textures to OpenGL? I dunno I'm grasping for straws here... It feels like other games at the time were able to do much better. I can't get a good feel for what their resolutions are, but the original Starcraft FMVs run at a higher framerate.

No, it's due to the encoding. I'm pretty sure they're not much more than 10-15 FPS. Why? Simple - keeps bandwidth down. A 30 FPS video will need 3x the bandwidth of an identical video at 10 FPS, and id had to develop Quake not just for the latest and greatest, but also for people who might be saddled with old Pentiums or whatever.

 

3 hours ago, Noiser said:

I remember seeing a mod where someone put an entire episode of Simpsons (or part of it, I don't remember) using just an animated texture. No ANIMDEFS, ANIMATED, nothing - that should work on DOSBox. I don't know how he made them go faster, but as it seems, you can add an infinite number of frames to animated textures and it will not crash.

 

Unfortunately I can't find the link anymore.

That's a bit different from what he wants, though - end-of-episode cinematics, like the PSX version has, so outside of normal level code for lack of a better way to put it. Essentially a full-screen video.

 

3 hours ago, Walter confetti said:

This one?

 

Definitely impressive (and I'm definitely wondering how he did it), but you can tell there's several shortcuts:

  • Color depth is clearly reduced (that might not even be 256 colors - possibly 64?)
  • Audio depth is definitely crippled (sounds 11 kHz at best)
  • Resolution is most definitely not 320x200

That'd kind of fall apart with what this guy wants. Impressive as fuck nonetheless though!

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Here's a video intro from a contemporary game (1993) from the same studio (Raven Software). Sorry for the dumb youtuber watermark, didn't found a better version.

 

Fun fact: it literally uses a different exe for this video. The game is launched by a .bat file that runs the intro and then runs the game.

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5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Videos of Chex Quest running in DOSBox don't show any videos playing (at least, ones I've seen). I did see a video for Strife but I don't know if that's running in the EXE or something else entirely - another video I saw skipped right to the "loading" screen.

Both of them run a separate program to play a video before loading the game engine itself. It's managed just by having a BAT file run one program after another.

 

Also:

 

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1 hour ago, chungy said:

Both of them run a separate program to play a video before loading the game engine itself. It's managed just by having a BAT file run one program after another.

 

Also:

 

Yeah, I'm aware of the intro itself. I meant that it didn't seem done by the main EXE that actually runs the game (which you confirmed).

 

So basically it's got its own EXE, but with the limitations of that it calls an EXE dedicated to movie playback, then launches the game. That would definitely preclude having it work like how he wants, since movie playback code would need to be added to the game EXE (since it'd need to be called at end-of-episode).

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On 9/10/2019 at 11:07 AM, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

Chocolate Hexen?

 

Isn't chocolate mods the game? Like allow widescreen and other unnecessary features for new gen? Last time I tried to launch Strife on Chocolate, it didn't even display the NPC's conversation text, just their names.

 

On 9/10/2019 at 11:07 AM, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

Trying to edit the Hexen EXE so that it recognizes the PS1 Hexen's cutscenes and plays them at the correct points sounds near impossible.  Looking on the Hexen PS1 CD, I see the cutscene files are in STR format.  I found an STR document online written by Michael Sabin that says "the decoding process is long, and rather complicated."  In other words, the cutscenes are in some convoluted format that was written specifically for the PS1 console--not DOS PCs.

 

So porting these videos for DOS\PC is very hard? :( I don't mind a port, as long it remains as vanila as DOS or dosbox.

 

On 9/10/2019 at 6:10 PM, Dark Pulse said:

Either convert the movie from the PlayStation's native STR format, or write a compatible implementation with that format (which would only work for that format - thus, useless for general use). It's been quite thoroughly reverse-engineered, so it shouldn't be too hard if someone cares enough.

 

Aside from PS1's emulators for PC, are there other ports that can run these formats, or perhaps some convector for these exist?

 

On 9/10/2019 at 6:10 PM, Dark Pulse said:

The PSX didn't have to worry about this, it had a hardware MDEC within its CPU.

 

Porting emulation of MDEC is not something possible?

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5 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Isn't chocolate mods the game? Like allow widescreen and other unnecessary features for new gen?

Exactly the opposite of what Chocolate Doom is about. See: https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About

6 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Last time I tried to launch Strife on Chocolate, it didn't even display the NPC's conversation text, just their names. 

Default vanilla behavior. Run chocolate-strife-setup, enter the sound menu, enable "Show text with voices"

7 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

So porting these videos for DOS\PC is very hard? :( I don't mind a port, as long it remains as vanila as DOS or dosbox.

Some conflicting goals here. ffmpeg could probably be integrated into Chocolate Hexen or Chocolate Strife (the latter was already done in Strife: Veteran Edition), but there's no way it's going to be running on DOS.

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2 minutes ago, chungy said:

Exactly the opposite of what Chocolate Doom is about. See: https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About

Default vanilla behavior. Run chocolate-strife-setup, enter the sound menu, enable "Show text with voices"

Some conflicting goals here. ffmpeg could probably be integrated into Chocolate Hexen or Chocolate Strife (the latter was already done in Strife: Veteran Edition), but there's no way it's going to be running on DOS.

 

Well, SLIGHTLY modified mod\port which would only allow PS1's cutscenes to play is all good tho.

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You have to realize that Hexen came on PC well before the PS1 version by almost 2 years, cutscenes would've probably been an after thought, console ports of PC games back in the day did get some enhancements and extras.

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16 minutes ago, Avoozl said:

You have to realize that Hexen came on PC well before the PS1 version by almost 2 years, cutscenes would've probably been an after thought, console ports of PC games back in the day did get some enhancements and extras.

 

Well yes, if something that came out later, it probably might get more stuff in it. Cutscenes were feel really fitting. Most of the HeXen's plot is after thought, though. For example, the "Korax" is supposed to be the Heresiarch, i.e. the red guy we see at the end of Heretic after beating the final boss. https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Heresiarch But some time later the idea was scrapped.

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4 hours ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

So porting these videos for DOS\PC is very hard? :( I don't mind a port, as long it remains as vanila as DOS or dosbox.

They can be converted, but good luck finding a video code that will run at acceptable speed, on DOS, and in the appropriate video mode. Again, there is no 320x200, 16/24-bit video mode. It simply did not exist, video cards back then did not have the video memory for it.

 

You would have to convert them to 256 colors, then decide if you're going to upsample or downsample the audio, and lastly, find a codec that will actually run under DOS, then do the messy work of converting them, coding up the movie support into the EXE, etc.

 

Basically this is the main problem with your stated wish. You could do this with relative ease under even Win9x, but DOS is far more limited in what it can do. There's a reason that once Win95 came out, support for DOS basically died within a few years.

 

4 hours ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Aside from PS1's emulators for PC, are there other ports that can run these formats, or perhaps some convector for these exist?

No, of course not. Why would there be? They are made for Playstation.

 

You could convert them, as I said, but then you are going to be doing some sacrifices due to DOS limitations. There is literally no way around the reduction of colors or the sound frequency other than using some vendor-specific video/audio mode (which then works on only those cards), or not using DOS period.

 

4 hours ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Porting emulation of MDEC is not something possible?

Definitely not, because you'd be having to emulate a HARDWARE decoder in software. Good luck doing that on a CPU from 1995, on an OS predating the multimedia revolution. Throw in that emulating the hardware means a completely different processor microarchitecture (MIPS vs. x86) and simply put, you're gonna have a bad time.

 

It'd be like getting a 386 to play Quake - the word "slideshow" comes to mind.

 

All of this is possible if you loosen up your requirements. A modern source port could do this, if someone bothered to add in some sort of movie playback. (It'd need to be more generic to be useful though, because there's no point in only supporting playback of one movie encoding format - you'd want wide support like ffmpeg). But you specifically want this on DOS (limiting it to DOS limitations - and there's MANY), or a minimally altered experience (which eliminates virtually all source ports). Chocolate Hexen, for example, is out, precisely because the whole point of Chocolate is to preserve 1:1 compatability with the original versions as much as possible, save for some stuff that's obsolete (like IPX Networking). Adding movies would stray from that, so you'd theoretically be looking at something more like a Crispy Hexen.

 

Theres just one problem: there is no Crispy Hexen. Or more accurately there technically is, but it's not being actively developed. And it obviously would not have any sort of movie playback code currently as a result.

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On 9/12/2019 at 7:44 AM, Dark Pulse said:

They can be converted, but good luck finding a video code that will run at acceptable speed, on DOS, and in the appropriate video mode. Again, there is no 320x200, 16/24-bit video mode. It simply did not exist, video cards back then did not have the video memory for it.

 

You would have to convert them to 256 colors, then decide if you're going to upsample or downsample the audio, and lastly, find a codec that will actually run under DOS, then do the messy work of converting them, coding up the movie support into the EXE, etc.

 

Basically this is the main problem with your stated wish. You could do this with relative ease under even Win9x, but DOS is far more limited in what it can do. There's a reason that once Win95 came out, support for DOS basically died within a few years.

 

The video itself is not necessarily need to fit the DOS format, I just want the game remain as vanila as only possible, though. What about a port that can run HeXen like dosbox, 100% vanila, but play the video in original PS1's resolutions?

On 9/12/2019 at 7:44 AM, Dark Pulse said:

No, of course not. Why would there be? They are made for Playstation.

 

You could convert them, as I said, but then you are going to be doing some sacrifices due to DOS limitations. There is literally no way around the reduction of colors or the sound frequency other than using some vendor-specific video/audio mode (which then works on only those cards), or not using DOS period.

 

Sad the DOS is a "no" in this one. Kinda weird, because both Blood, Chex, and even Duke Nukem's short cutscenes were run on DOS with no problem. Hell, I might be wrong, but even Captain Claw seemed to work on DOS while still playing these cartoons.

 

Again, is there any port that would just play both vanila Hexen and vanila PS1's cutscenes?

 

On 9/12/2019 at 7:44 AM, Dark Pulse said:

All of this is possible if you loosen up your requirements. A modern source port could do this, if someone bothered to add in some sort of movie playback. (It'd need to be more generic to be useful though, because there's no point in only supporting playback of one movie encoding format - you'd want wide support like ffmpeg). But you specifically want this on DOS (limiting it to DOS limitations - and there's MANY), or a minimally altered experience (which eliminates virtually all source ports). Chocolate Hexen, for example, is out, precisely because the whole point of Chocolate is to preserve 1:1 compatability with the original versions as much as possible, save for some stuff that's obsolete (like IPX Networking). Adding movies would stray from that, so you'd theoretically be looking at something more like a Crispy Hexen.

 

Theres just one problem: there is no Crispy Hexen. Or more accurately there technically is, but it's not being actively developed. And it obviously would not have any sort of movie playback code currently as a result.

 

That's kinda sad... Well, thanks for your information! Anyway, the PS1 HeXen's maps are a tiny bit altered from the original HeXen. Would love if someone could port them for PC, though. :P

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44 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Anyway, the PS1 HeXen's maps are a tiny bit altered from the original HeXen.

Haven't saw the differences for the maps really, aside of the slow scripting speed

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1 hour ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

The video itself is not necessarily need to fit the DOS format, I just want the game remain as vanila as only possible, though. What about a port that can run HeXen like dosbox, 100% vanila, but play the video in original PS1's resolutions?

DOSBox is emulating a DOS PC down to the hardware level. That means it's beholden to DOS's limitations, and one of those limitations is that there is no "standard" (i.e; VGA) 320x200x16/24-bit color mode. The highest the standard supports is 320x200, 256 colors. You can go higher rez but then you lose colors.

 

The problem is the color palette is simply too rich for DOS and graphics processing of the time.

 

I took the liberty of converting every single frame of the FMVs to PNG images, loading up the largest PNG image of the lot (i.e; the single biggest frame of all the movies), and counting its unique colors. There were actually two candidates, each a 175KB PNG - both from the ending movie. One of them (Frame 313) counted 56,430 colors; the other (Frame 0) counted 46,826 colors.

 

Therefore, to do this without quality loss, you'd need at least a 65,535 colors mode (i.e; at least 16-bit color, as I suspected). VGA does not have that.

 

DOSBox does, however, have support for VESA video modes, one of which is a 16-bit color mode at 320x200 (Mode 270, or 782 on Linux). The downside is that this would reduce it working (in an actual hardware sense) to VESA-spec cards. This actually means it wouldn't work on cards that only support standard VGA stuff. Not important for emulation, but it'd mean as an actual source port runnable on an actual computer, you just narrowed down what old computers it can run on to a fraction of a fraction.

 

And again, even if the card is technically capable, that doesn't mean it will "just work" - the CPU has to do all of this decoding as well.

 

1 hour ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Sad the DOS is a "no" in this one. Kinda weird, because both Blood, Chex, and even Duke Nukem's short cutscenes were run on DOS with no problem. Hell, I might be wrong, but even Captain Claw seemed to work on DOS while still playing these cartoons.

Chex didn't have cutscenes; it had an intro movie. The movie was run through a separate EXE, and even that was definitely compressed down to 256 colors.

 

Duke's were done in-engine somehow, but they were literally just an image sequence played with some audio at the same time - and at very low framerates. You're looking at ~20 FPS for PS1 Hexen; that's faster than Duke's by at least 2x, if not 3x.

 

Dunno about Blood (didn't play it), but I'd imagine it has much of the same limitations - no more than 256 colors, and a low framerate to keep the work the CPU has to do down.

 

1 hour ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Again, is there any port that would just play both vanila Hexen and vanila PS1's cutscenes?

No, because nobody's cared enough to make one. Most ports focus on playing a Doom Engine game, not playing movies that came with specific (and the lousiest) ports of a Doom engine game.

 

And before you think I'm bashing Hexen on the PS1, I actually owned it. I remember sacrificing whole memory cards to it. I can be objective and say it's the crappiest port of Hexen, and I think just about anyone who knows their stuff would agree.

 

1 hour ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

Anyway, the PS1 HeXen's maps are a tiny bit altered from the original HeXen. Would love if someone could port them for PC, though. :P

I'm actually curious as to what exact engine it is. Clearly Probe didn't straight-up use PSX Doom Engine, and there's some different file formats. Maps get stored in a folder, with several files within:

  • WAD - This is actually openable in SLADE! However, its map format is clearly not the standard Doom map format. It only contains the map header itself, plus the associated lumps - THINGS, LINEDEFS, SIDEDEFS, VERTEXES, SEGS, SSECTORS, NODES, SECTORS, REJECT, BLOCKMAP, LEAFS, BEHAVIOR.
    • The appearance of LEAFS is surprising, as it'd indicate that it is based on the PSX Doom code in some fashion, because those two ports (plus Doom 64) are the only Doom Engine games LEAFS appeared in; however, some of the other associated files were definitely not part of them.
  • SPN - What this is is entirely unknown. My guess is it's related to Sprites somehow, as it's a very small file. Always exactly 292 bytes.
  • TC - Even more mysterious. The regular patterns in here indicate something, but as to what... your guess is as good as mine. Always exactly 87,576 bytes.
  • SPR - Sprites, obviously.
  • TEX - Sidedef textures.
  • MAP - This is puzzling for sure. If the map header is already in the WAD, what's this MAP file for? Always exactly 256 bytes.
  • AVF - A whole lot of "random" data, which leads me to believe it's graphical data of some kind, but that's as much as I can go on.

It's possible that this is some sort of further enhancement of the PSX Doom engine (as SPR and TEX are definitely formats that engine used), but that would require either that Williams gave the team at Probe access to their engine, or that somehow id was able to grant them rights to that engine as well as part of some agreement or whatever. It's also just as possible that this is somehow running on a modified version of the original Doom engine that PC Hexen was built off of (i.e; based off Heretic, which itself was based off Doom v1.2.)

 

It's all pretty confusing.

 

Lastly of note: There's actually also a file named MOVIE.EXE, so even on the PSX itself, it's calling a separate EXE whose job is to play the movies and then hand back control to the proper game EXE. (The actual game EXE is the SLUS_003.48 file.)

Edited by Dark Pulse

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2 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Lastly of note: There's actually also a file named MOVIE.EXE, so even on the PSX itself, it's calling a separate EXE whose job is to play the movies and then hand back control to the proper game EXE. (The actual game EXE is the SLUS_003.48 file.)

 

But making some .exe changes, or idk, some else changes, would make it be possible to work on DOS? Sorry for repeating myself, as I get more confused. What I ask, if dosbox runs hexen.exe, but make that .exe run that movie.exe at right moment in right time, would that still run on dosbox or it would open that movie.exe as standalone programm that would still display these cutscenes infront of your screen regardless?

 

 

2 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

No, because nobody's cared enough to make one. Most ports focus on playing a Doom Engine game, not playing movies that came with specific (and the lousiest) ports of a Doom engine game.

 

And before you think I'm bashing Hexen on the PS1, I actually owned it. I remember sacrificing whole memory cards to it. I can be objective and say it's the crappiest port of Hexen, and I think just about anyone who knows their stuff would agree.

 

So the only way (or the easiest, at least) to make the cutscenes play is to have some kind of port that would work exactly like DOS, or say, chocolate HeXen, just in addition to have PS1's movie format capability of playing, and put in timers in it?

 

What aboout some .bat? What if made some .bat that would launch hexen.exe and then movie.exe at right time like when start the game and then at each chapter?

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9 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

But making some .exe changes, or idk, some else changes, would make it be possible to work on DOS? Sorry for repeating myself, as I get more confused. What I ask, if dosbox runs hexen.exe, but make that .exe run that movie.exe at right moment in right time, would that still run on dosbox or it would open that movie.exe as standalone programm that would still display these cutscenes infront of your screen regardless?

No, that's impossible.  Dark Pulse just said:

 

3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

DOSBox is emulating a DOS PC down to the hardware level. That means it's beholden to DOS's limitations, and one of those limitations is that there is no "standard" (i.e; VGA) 320x200x16/24-bit color mode. The highest the standard supports is 320x200, 256 colors. You can go higher rez but then you lose colors.

 

The problem is the color palette is simply too rich for DOS and graphics processing of the time.

9 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

What aboout some .bat? What if made some .bat that would launch hexen.exe and then movie.exe at right time like when start the game and then at each chapter?

That's not even possible.  And on top of that, PS1 exes don't run on PCs.

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3 minutes ago, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

No, that's impossible.  Dark Pulse just said:

 

 


So what you're saying, the moment I launch the dosbox, it forces the whole emulation of DOS to ALL over my PC, not just the mere programm\.exe I'm running it with?

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Just now, MaxRideWizardLord said:


So what you're saying, the moment I launch the dosbox, it forces the whole emulation of DOS to ALL over my PC, not just the mere programm\.exe I'm running it with?

No, the DOS emulation is still happening within the program.  But programs launched from within DOSBox are going to be running in DOSBox.  And Hexen's movie.exe cannot be run on a PC.

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15 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

But making some .exe changes, or idk, some else changes, would make it be possible to work on DOS? Sorry for repeating myself, as I get more confused.

Assuming you don't mind it being reduced to 256 colors, it's possible to work on DOS on standard VGA hardware. 16-bit color (65k+ colors) would require a VESA-capable card, which means not all actual DOS machines could run it (DOSBox would be fine as it supports those).

 

15 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

What I ask, if dosbox runs hexen.exe, but make that .exe run that movie.exe at right moment in right time, would that still run on dosbox or it would open that movie.exe as standalone programm that would still display these cutscenes infront of your screen regardless?

DOS doesn't work like that, mostly because it doesn't have multitasking. It essentially runs one program at a time, and that program is given full control of the system's resources. There are exceptions to this (programs called TSRs) but they are few and far between, and generally are small, simple programs (probably the most well-known ones are stuff like DOSKEY which gives you a buffer for past commands).

 

The other downside is that calling a new program kills the old one. This is why Chex, Strife, etc. have them as intro movies before the game proper launches - there's no way to have Program A run, then let Program B run, and return to Program A. Program A got killed when Program B ran; its memory and contents got vaporized and replaced by Program B's. You'd have to somehow store Program A's data, run Program B, relaunch Program A and then restore Program A's memory. DOS wasn't designed for this.

 

15 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

So the only way (or the easiest, at least) to make the cutscenes play is to have some kind of port that would work exactly like DOS, or say, chocolate HeXen, just in addition to have PS1's movie format capability of playing, and put in timers in it?

No, the easiest way to make this work is to use a modern Windows source port, add in some sort of general movie support via FFMPEG or something, convert the STRs to some sort of codec FFMPEG understands, and have it play the movie. From the source port's POV, it would just set flags that a movie is playing, wait for the movie to finish, and once it is, proceed on with game execution.

 

Again, the major limitation is DOS. This gets much easier and more possible to do with a modern source port, as they are inherently built for this kind of multitasking and program libraries and all that stuff.

 

15 minutes ago, MaxRideWizardLord said:

What aboout some .bat? What if made some .bat that would launch hexen.exe and then movie.exe at right time like when start the game and then at each chapter?

Launch is easy enough because it doesn't need to care about the game state; in-game is a no-no - see my earlier stuff about how DOS programs take full control of the system and raze the previous program's contents.

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